CRITIC’S NOTEBOOK; Defending a Scrap of Soul Against MoMA

By MICHAEL KIMMELMAN

Published: May 13, 2013

Last week was a good one for common sense and manning the barricades in New York. The City Planning Commission recommended limiting the special permit that allows Madison Square Garden to operate at its current site, which opens the door to fixing Penn Station, trapped below it.

And the Museum of Modern Art blinked.

Faced with a storm of protests, the Modern stepped back from its plan to demolish its diminutive neighbor on West 53rd Street, the former American Folk Art Museum, a striking sliver of a building designed by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, admired in architectural quarters. MoMA announced that Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the New York firm, which among other things remodeled the Lincoln Center campus and collaborated on the first two phases of the High Line, will do what should have been done in the first place: provide a clear rationale for expansion to the west of its current site, which would subsume the former museum.

“Whether we include Folk Art or not, as is, is an open question,” stressed Jerry I. Speyer, the real estate developer and the Modern’s chairman. The remark sounded suspiciously as if the Modern’s officials anticipate going through this belated architectural and public relations exercise only to tear down the building anyway, except perhaps a token part of it.

That would be a mistake and miss what this tiny building, albeit flawed, signifies. The stakes go beyond the Modern to civic health. Midtown and MoMA could both use more variety, serendipity and soul. The former folk art museum building, having all those things, isn’t an obstacle to progress but an opportunity.

When it opened late in 2001, its ingenuity and craft, laden with symbolism after Sept. 11, made it an instant architectural attraction, even though, crammed onto a minuscule lot, it turned out to be mostly stairwells and passages inside, the galleries narrow and tricky to install with art.

By the time the folk art museum officials sold their place to MoMA in 2011 to help pay off a mountain of debt, skeptics pointed to the building as another case of architectural vanity by a cultural institution with overweening ambition, implying that the architects shared the fiscal blame, having merely done a cunning job with an impossible site. For its part, the Modern had arranged to expand into floors of an 82-story tower by Jean Nouvel to rise west of the folk museum, on a plot the Modern sold to Hines, the Houston developer. MoMA officials let it be known that the folk museum’s faceted bronze-alloy facade didn’t fit in with the Modern’s glass aesthetic and that its floors didn’t line up with MoMA’s, as if that constituted a design obstacle too formidable to overcome.

The message was clear: A museum dedicated to contemporary art and design wanted to destroy a distinctive work of contemporary design. The Modern had previously found ways to incorporate parts of its earlier buildings into its current one, so it wasn’t unfamiliar with adaptive reuse. And yes, it had knocked down buildings before, good ones even, to make way for earlier expansions. But all that happened in the past, and it doesn’t excuse a fresh act of what the architecture critic James S. Russell, speaking for a chorus of detractors, called “cultural vandalism.”

The backlash revealed a surprising antipathy toward MoMA. Not so long ago, it was the art museum New Yorkers loved and identified with; it seemed familial, its scale personal. It had a special place in the city’s heart. The Met was the big pompous, bureaucratic machine. Now the tables have turned, and even while it has grown, the Met has come to seem the nimble, venturesome one, more intimately loved. A 40-something friend told me the other morning: “I used to spend my days in the previous incarnation of MoMA after my father died. Back then MoMA was my chapel. I would make my way to my favorite Rothko, and the progression from the street to that gallery in the old building didn’t feel like you were moving through a shopping mall or a W Hotel.” He stopped going to the museum after its expansion in 2004, and canceled his family membership. “It’s just not a place for New Yorkers anymore,” he said.

I thought about that progression. Years ago, 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues was a pokey Midtown cross street. The Modern, smaller yet somehow more distinctive, was tucked into the middle of the block with an entrance that, from the front doors, looked straight through the garden to the town houses on West 54th Street: a view from the city back into it. The Modern was in and of the urban fabric. Its ethos was embedded in the street grid, its architecture dovetailing with the art inside, so much of it consonant with the syncopated rhythms and complex geometry of New York.

Today, West 53rd Street is a monotonous corporate corridor. Across the street from MoMA, a 50-story luxury hotel-condo tower will soon sit atop the Donnell Library Center, once a haunt for generations of New Yorkers. The library, it was also revealed last week, will be squeezed into its basement, a third of its original size. I liked Yoshio Tanaguchi’s MoMA building before it opened nine years ago — proving it’s a fool’s game to judge any place before it’s up and running. The museum has turned out to be a people-moving machine, with a Sheetrock atrium, cut off from the street, herding masses upward toward anodyne spaces without repose. The problem involves more than crowds. It is baked into the architecture and the mind-set.

By contrast, the former folk museum, with its textured, tooled facade like a Paul Klee or the hinged door of an ancient temple, is a skinny little chess whiz in a college classroom of jocks, a clever outlier on the street, a work of artisanal sculpture whose idiosyncrasy is in keeping with the objects it was conceived to house.

It’s a relief on the block, representing the diversity vital to healthy streets — not a perfect building, not even its architects’ best work. But its unembarrassed, luxuriant materiality, its small scale and vulnerability, all qualities that the Modern now seems to reject, belong no less than the glass tower to the messy story of Modernism and city life.

Economic development encourages the proliferation of glass giants, tourism and ever bigger museums, but not always smart streets or better culture. The building by Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien can be saved, and more than just its facade, whose preservation might be the museum’s strategic fallback position. Maybe the former folk museum could become a respite in the future Modern — or its galleries a refuge for photographs or drawings or design objects. The clash with MoMA’s unrelenting elevation on 53rd Street, and with its wearying interior, is its virtue.

For the moment, give MoMA’s trustees credit for listening to critics of the demolition, just as city planning officials heeded the growing calls to improve Penn Station, notwithstanding the desires of the owners of Madison Square Garden. Clearly, the climate is changing and New Yorkers can make themselves heard when it comes to shaping the public realm.

Institutions, lavished with tax breaks, responsible to the people, would do well to listen. (New York Public Library, that includes you.)

PHOTOS: Far left, the former home of the American Folk Art Museum. Its neighbor, the Museum of Modern Art, in other photographs above, has sought to raze the folk art museum in an expansion. (PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBERT WRIGHT FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)